#266: Selective Environmenting

February 24, 2019
·
Detroit, MI

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Back from hibernation. The draft is in progress; the house is
in progress; let’s not talk again about either until they’re
done (soon). I’ve been fermenting, both in a metaphorical
sense and a literal one: there’s a jar of red-purple
almost-kraut on a counter in my kitchen. Next to it is another
jar, stuffed with crunchy okra, cloves of garlic, sliced red
peppers, stray fennel left over from a previous meal. A few
steps from that, on two different shelves: a ginger bug,
effervescing, and a colony of kefir grains, eating through the
lactose in two cups of milk and farting out sour
deliciousness.

A couple weeks ago I was reading Sandor Ellix Katz’s stunning
tome, The Art of Fermentation, and this paragraph hit
me like a bolt of lightning:

Stuffing vegetables tightly into a jar so they are submerged
under their own juices constitutes a selective environment.
By excluding air, we make it impossible for mold to grow on
the vegetables, which has the effect of encouraging lactic
acid bacteria [naturally present on their surfaces] […] Much
of the practice and technique of fermentation amounts to
understanding the selective environment you want, and
effectively creating and maintaining it.

That, in a way, is what I’ve been doing all these years. What
you, the reader, get from me in the form of books, talks,
essays, podcasts, etc., is the shredded cabbage of my raw
experiences, fermented in the
selective environment of my creative practice. You
get infrequent glass jars of potent, tasty stuff, and here, on
Sundays, I talk about how the kimchee is made.

One factor of that selective environment is a topic I don’t
write about much here—money. Money’s kind of the salt in the
brine: too little and it doesn’t provide enough of a buffer
for art-making lifeforms; too much of it and, I would argue,
those lifeforms themselves get choked out—unless, that is, you
expand too. Unless you get you get a bigger vat and stuff it
with more veggies, embark on more ambitious projects. (Here’s
where the analogy stars to fall apart, though: it’s not just
about more output, but also higher-quality output.)

I’m at a point in my writing career where the income I make
from writing and related activities covers all my expenses,
most of the time. I phrase it that way because the biggest
challenge is the irregularity of the income—is planning ahead.
Advances tend to come in as the manuscripts are sold,
delivered, and published. Extra royalties come in a couple
times a year. If you’re an author with a stable of published
titles, maybe you can count on a more steady income from
those. But I’m not quite there yet. There’s a lot of planning
ahead I have to do to smooth out my income, stock up my root
cellar (if you will) for those barren months.

Which leads me to this: I’ve been thinking about setting up
paid memberships as a way to support my creative practice. As
contributing members, you’d not only help me keep doing what I
do, but you’d also get some other to-be-decided perks. But I
want to be thoughtful and intentional about this, and I’d love
to hear from you before I put anything in place. Do you
currently contribute or subscribe to other artists or writers,
via Patreon (or otherwise)? How much do you give per
month/year? What do you find most rewarding about it? What
else comes to mind when you read this?

Update: As you may have guessed from the navigation at the top
of my site, I ended up going forward with memberships. You can
learn more here.

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